Are you looking for a way to boost the success of your next online event? If so, you’re not alone. We are starting to see more businesses host webinars, podcasts, and social media live streams than ever before, and for several good reasons.
These events are a great place to communicate with your audience, show off your latest products, and learn about how customers see the industry. You can then use what you’ve learned to get more leads for your business while finding ways to tweak your existing marketing strategy.
If you want to learn how to get more people to register for your next big stream, make sure to stick around. We are going to look at several ways to get customers hyped about your event. When people are excited, they are naturally more inclined to register their name and email for a spot.
Let’s get started!
Understand customer pain points and goals
Before you can create your registration form, you have to spend some time understanding your customers’ pain points and goals. If your event doesn’t resonate with your audience, you’re not going to see many signups.
It all starts with a clear value proposition. What do you hope to help attendees achieve when they join in on your event? If you don’t know, it may be time to create customer personas for your various audience segments.
Essentially, business owners and marketing teams create customer personas to understand the people who visit their site. For instance, a pet shop owner would create segments for all of the different pet owners, with some cross over personas for people with multiple pets.
Here’s an example of a customer persona so you can see what we mean:
As you can see, this example summarizes a specific personality type that visits an online shoe store. If this was your business, you could use plenty of this information to make your events relevant and entertaining for your customers.
You can find out more about your audience by tracking your website traffic with Google Analytics, talking to people on social media, and reviewing your support team’s tickets.
Specifically, you’ll want to pay attention to the buying habits, demographics, and browsing behavior of your site visitors. Once you have a firm understanding of your customers and a top-notch value proposition in mind, it’s time to create your registration form.
Create an intuitive registration form
Your registration form will have a significant impact on how many people sign up for your event. If your form is easy to understand, organized, and fast, you can look forward to plenty of signups.
You’ll want to ask for users’ email address and name when they register. Use this information to send them personalized emails that provide additional resources and reminders about your event.
Depending on your audience segments, it’s a good idea to include a question that helps you learn more about your audience. For example, if your site focuses on teaching people about marketing, you could ask users to click the box next to the marketing categories highlighting their pain points or goals.
If someone clicks email and social media marketing, you know that relevant content and events centered on those categories might intrigue the attendee to open your next email.
You never stop building your customer personas, so these questions can come in handy—especially when you’re segmenting your audience.
Plugins like WPForms make it easy to build registration forms for your next webinar, podcast or live stream. The simple drag and drop builder means you can quickly create a visually appealing, intuitive registration form in just a couple of minutes.
Don’t neglect the value of a simple registration form that tells users precisely what they are signing up for and what they can expect after attending your online event.
Promote your event
Now that you’ve identified your audience and created your registration form, it’s time to promote your event. There are three key ways you’ll want to let people know what you have planned. Email, social media and on-site promotions all have unique benefits depending on who you want to sign up for your event.
Send out email reminders to your existing subscribers so they can attend. Just because someone subscribed to your list a while back, that doesn’t mean they can’t get more value from your brand by checking out your next webinar.
Generally, you should send out three emails for upcoming events. Send out a message letting them know that they have a week to sign up. Next, send out a 24-hour notice, then the last call on the day of your event.
On-site notifications can also boost your registrations with people who are not subscribed and don’t follow you on social media. Below, we can see an example of an event promotion created with the popup builder included with OptinMonster.
Including popups that alert users about activities on-site will help you secure more registrations. It’s vital that you stress the importance of attending the event. In our example above, the benefit of attending the webinar is clear—users can learn how to plan and publish a book. If someone lands on a website about writing and sees that event popup, they will likely subscribe and register for the upcoming webinar.
Finally, let’s talk about the value of promoting your event on social media. Over 3.81 billion people use social media across all platforms, so it’s a safe bet that you can reach your audience on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, among other sites.
Make sure you put your event on display through your posts so your existing followers can see what you have planned. These folks are far more likely to register because they see the value in your company, so much so that they decided to follow your business page.
Creating ads on key platforms can also help you dramatically boost your registrations. For instance, a webinar on leadership would likely see plenty of engagement as a sponsored post on LinkedIn.
Find out where your audience spends most of their time on social media, and create promotions that encourage them to register and follow your company on those platforms.
Split test your CTA
Split tests are an excellent way to improve your conversions and registration form signups. If you’re not familiar, spit tests are experiments used by marketers to improve their campaigns’ effectiveness.
Small changes to your existing forms and promotions can yield positive results for event attendance and engagement. It’s up to you to decide which elements you would like to test. But the most common things you can change include text copy, signup placement, and the color of your call-to-action.
Research shows that simply changing your call-to-action (CTA) color from red to green can result in 21% more conversions. You might not experience the same results, so make sure you test everything so you can achieve maximum engagement and signups.
Testing is a time-consuming process, but one worth using if you’re struggling to reach your attendance and participation goals. Showing users your promotion in a new light could encourage people who would otherwise pass to register.
We recommend testing each of your changes for at least two weeks so you can gather accurate results. You don’t want to make a quick decision after one or two days, because your numbers will likely fluctuate more over time.
Conclusion
It’s clear that we are going to see more businesses hosting online events in the future. Standing out from everyone else will help you get better results during your events, which will lead to more sales and subscriptions.
The more you learn about your audience, the better chance you’ll have at getting people excited about your next video or audio stream. Feel free to use the tips we’ve mentioned today to build a solid marketing strategy around your upcoming online events.
